


as kind as summer

by consumptive_sphinx



Category: Amenta - Alicorn
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Mixed caste kids
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-19
Updated: 2017-08-19
Packaged: 2018-12-17 10:53:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11850075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/consumptive_sphinx/pseuds/consumptive_sphinx
Summary: Her destiny is orange, her mother tells her, and Elsie says fuck destiny.





	as kind as summer

She is born to an orange mother, and so she is an orange. Her father calls her the most intelligent daughter he’ll ever have — never mind that she is his only daughter, and her parents are unlikely to afford another — and her mother calls her a child who is going to need to be kinder. 

The name they give her, Elsfar, is popular among oranges and very odd for yellows, and she shortens it to Elsie as soon as she is old enough to express a preference. 

Elsie’s mother teaches one-year-olds, and she models kindness with every breath. Elsie’s father is a contract lawyer, and he teaches Elsie the tricks of his trade — the ins and outs of intellectual property laws, the ways he persuades people to agree to sign a slip of paper — and he ruffles her peach-colored hair and tells her she’ll go as far as she wants. 

 

When she is young she does not care about being kind.  _ Kind _ is for her mother, who pulls Elsie away from her father’s law books and says “You’ll thank me later,” who tells Elsie’s father not to teach her these things, doesn’t he know she won’t grow up to be yellow?  _ Kind _ is for her teachers, who take off points when she uses in-caste pronouns for her father and her friends in the house next door.  _ Kind  _ is for oranges, and Elsie’s one year old mind thinks that if she isn’t kind and is very very clever, they might let her be yellow. 

Even so, she tries not to be cruel. When two of her classmates can’t seem to stop themselves from hurting each other, Elsie takes both of them aside separately, hears both of them out, and hand-writes a contract in marker and has them sign it in crayon. Her teachers tell her parents that those aren’t quite the conflict resolution skills they were hoping to teach, and Elsie’s mother purses her lips and Elsie’s father laughs and laughs. 

“I’ve raised a clever girl,” he says, and Elsie’s mother tells him, “She’s an  _ orange,” _ and then turns to Elsie. “It’s not enough to be clever. You’re going to have to be kind.” 

 

The spring that Elsie turns two, she gets a little brother. They name him Atsela, which is popular for yellows and rare among oranges. 

Atsela’s hair is the color of creamsicles and he’s too young to dye it, but he is born to a yellow father and so he is a yellow. Elsie’s mother says that having a little brother will teach Elsie to care for children, calls it a learning experience. Elsie calls him a pink potato. 

By winter that year he is a walking nightmare, and Elsie spends all the time she can in her father’s office where she is allowed and Atsela is not. Her mother despairs of her ever being able to be orange correctly, and Elsie takes a vicious kind of joy in not being  _ kind _ enough to care. 

 

The girl in the house next door to Elsie's goes to the yellow school in their neighborhood, but she and Elsie still spend time together on weekends. She’s delighted with Atsela, promises she’ll keep an eye on him when he’s old enough to go to her school, and doesn’t understand why Elsie doesn’t like being asked to take care of him. 

“He’s so cute,” she says. “And he’s past the point where he’s screaming all the time, I would love to have a brother that age.” 

“You can keep him if you want him,” Elsie says, and goes back to reading about tax loopholes. 

 

When Elsie is three, she has a language teacher with hair the color of moss — he isn’t a green, but he’s half-green, and he doesn’t dye his hair like Atsela does or like Elsie wishes she had to. 

He teaches the class Anitami like he’s supposed to, but he has a special lecture on the last day of the season about casted pronouns: talks about the way castes are grouped together in languages that clump (there’s blue and green and yellow versus orange and purple and grey, there’s blue and green and yellow and orange versus purple and grey, there’s blue and orange versus green and yellow versus purple and grey), talks about languages with colorless pronouns, never once refers to greens with anything but in-caste pronouns no matter what language he’s using.

He pulls Elsie aside after class and says “I’ve read your writing and I’ve heard you speak, and I want you to know that not everyone with hair like yours is what you think of when you say  _ kind. _ You can be kind even if you hate being orange, you can have a life even if you hate being orange. You’ve got potential in your own caste too.” 

Elsie nods and Elsie believes it, believes it more than she ever believed anything she has ever been told. For the first time in her life, being orange feels like an option, like an offer and not a restriction. 

 

Elsie doesn’t have that teacher again the next season, but she stops referring to oranges with out-of-caste pronouns, drops some of her more conspicuously yellow mannerisms, makes a conscious effort to befriend her orange classmates as well as her yellow neighbors. She doesn’t have to  _ like _ the color of her hair, but she stops forcing herself to hate it more than she truly does. 

She still does not call herself orange — some things really do need growing into — but she throws herself into being kind, and maybe that’s just as good. 


End file.
